History of U.S. Legislation
1819 Congress passed the Indian Civilization Fund Act, which granted $10K to missionaries to Christianize Indigenous peoples. This act provided a foundation for the boarding school system in the late 1800s, many of which were led by Christian missions.
1824 The Office of Indian Affairs was created under the U.S. War Department to administer Civilization Act funds to churches.
1860 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) opens the first on-reservation boarding school on the Yakama Nation reservation at Fort Simcoe.
1869 The Peace Policy was passed by President Ulysses S. Grant to replace “corrupt Indian agents” on reservations, granting Christian missionaries power over education programs on tribal lands.
1879 Richard Henry Pratt opened the first off-reservation boarding school Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
1891 Congress passed a law requiring Native American children to attend boarding schools.
1893 Congress gave the Secretary of the Interior power to withhold rations and annuities from Native American parents who refused to send their children to school.
1934 The Indian Reorganization Act was passed to decrease U.S. government control over Native American affairs and required tribes to create constitution-like governing policies or be terminated.
1969 The U.S. Senate issued a report titled “Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge” (also known as the Kennedy Report) and cited the failure of boarding schools.
1972 Survival schools and the American Indian Movement: Native American parents started an education movement for Indigenous youth focused on cultural revitalization.
1978 The Indian Child Welfare Act passed, which gave Native American parents the legal right to deny their children’s placement in off-reservation schools. It also protects NativeAmerican children from adoption with non-Natives as a way to prevent further removal of kids from their tribal communities.
“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”
• A total of 408 Indian boarding schools in the United States across 37 states and territories were federally operated from 1819 through 1969, which coincided with the removal of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands.
1978 The American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed, which protects spiritual practices once forbidden and punished in boarding schools.
1990 The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) passed, which requires federally funded institutions to review and return to their respective tribal nations certain cultural artifacts, funerary objects, and human remains held by museums and federal agencies in their collections.
Hastiin To’Haali (Diné) (angelized and mistranscribed to Tom Torlino), Souvenir of the Carlisle Indian School, 1902. Courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. Hastiin To’Haali attended Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania from 1882–1886. Before and after photographs were often taken to document the progress in “civilizing” Indian children.
• In 1879, Army General Richard Henry Pratt established the first off-reservation boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Pratt believed that Indian boarding schools had to be established in white communities to achieve complete assimilation.
• “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” became a well-known phrase from Pratt’s 1892 speech given at the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver, Colorado. This phrase encompassed Pratt’s philosophy on Native American education and became central to the assimilation goals of Indian boarding schools across the United States.
Residential Schools in Canada
PRATT’S PHILOSOPHY ON NATIVE AMERICAN EDUCATION:
“ A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.
Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
• Canada federally operated 139 boarding schools between 1870 and 1997.
• Canada modeled its residential school system after schools in the United States’ system.
• In 1876, Nicholas Flood Davin, a Canadian parliament member, suggested Canada adopt a system similar to the Carlisle Indian School to fix Canada’s “Indian problem.”
• Almost all the residential schools in Canada were operated by Christian missionaries; the Catholic church ran approximately 70 percent of them.
Treatment of Indigenous Children in Boarding Schools
• Upon arrival at the boarding schools, all traditional clothing and personal belongings of the children were stripped away. They were bathed in bleach and their braids or long hair was cut. Children were made to wear standard or military uniforms and given Anglo-American names.
• Children were punished for speaking their native language and banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural, and spiritual abuse and neglect; experienced treatment that often constituted torture; and were exposed to deadly disease outbreaks such as smallpox and tuberculosis.
• Students were coerced into heavy manual labor and some daily routines consisted of several hours of military drills. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for.
Boarding Schools in the United States
Five states with the most boarding schools:
1. Oklahoma (79)
2. Arizona (48)
3. New Mexico (45)
4. Alaska (25)
5. South Dakota (31)
It’s estimated that by 1926 nearly 83 percent of Native school-age children were attending boarding schools.
15 6 7 6 9 3 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 7 1 2 2 3 4 4 2 5 2 14 1814 21 10 3 10 12 11 25 79 31 48 45
Boarding Schools in Washington
There were 15 boarding schools operated in Washington State:
1. Chehalis Boarding and Day School
2. Colville Mission School
3. Cushman Indian School
4. Fort Simcoe Indian Boarding School
5. Fort Spokane Boarding School
6. Neah Bay Boarding and Day School
7. Puyallup Indian School
8. Quinaielt Boarding and Day School
9. S’Kokomish Boarding and Day School
10. St. George Indian Residential School
11. St. Joseph’s Boarding School
12. Paschal Sherman Indian School
13. Tonasket Boarding School
14. Tulalip Indian Industrial School
15. Tulalip Mission School
Fort Simcoe Indian Boarding School
• In 1860, the BIA opened the first on-reservation Indian boarding school in the country on the Yakama Indian Reservation at Fort Simcoe.
• The Treaty of 1855 merged 14 bands and tribes of Indigenous groups into the Yakama Nation, forcing them to cede approximately 11 million acres of land. It also mandated that agricultural and industrial trade schools be established on the reservation.
1 . Chehalis Boarding and Day School
2. Colville Mission School
3. Cushman Indian School
4. Fort Simcoe Indian Boarding School
5. Fort Spokane Boarding School
6. Neah Bay Boarding and Day School
7. Puyallup Indian School
8. Quinaielt Boarding and Day School
9 . S'Kokomish Boarding and Day School
10. St. George Indian Residential School
1 1 St. Joseph's Boarding School
12. Paschal Sherman Indian School
13. Tonasket Boarding School
14. Tulalip Indian Industrial School
1 5. Tulalip Mission School
“ The schools were meant to teach the Yakama productive skills that would help them better assimilate into American culture... This process involved eradicating any trace of Yakama culture among the students. Boys’ long hair was shorn, and Yakama names conferred in religious ceremonies were discarded as the students were baptized as Christians and given “proper” Christian and American names.”
– Yakima Herald
Girls dormitory at Fort Simcoe boarding school in an undated photo. Courtesy of Yakima Valley Museum & Yakima Herald.
411 5 2 6 1 8 7 12 13 9 10 3 14 15
Acknowledgment and Reconciliation Efforts
The Indian boarding school system is responsible for the devastating loss of tribal language, cultural resources, and the ongoing intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities.
In Canada….
• Canada attempted to investigate and document Indian residential schools 15 years before the United States.
• In 2006, a settlement agreement was approved by the Canadian government and Indigenous peoples. Former residential school survivors received financial compensation and the government paid $125 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
• The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2008 and Canada issued a formal apology for residential schools.
• In 2019, the Canadian federal court approved a settlement for Indigenous people who were forced to attend schools. The government began processing claims in January 2021, with survivors set to receive compensation of $10,000 each.
• The government has promised to distribute around $22 million to help locate unmarked graves of children who died at the schools.
• During the 2022 papal visit, the Catholic church acknowledged the Church’s role in the violent residential school system.
In the United States….
• In June 2021, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a multiphased study intended to document the impacts of federal Indian boarding school policies.
Volume 1 (released May 11, 2022) includes a collection of records related to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s implementation of boarding school policy and formal consultation with tribal nations to clarify the processes for protecting identified burial sites.
Currently, Secretary Haaland’s “The Road to Healing” cross-country tour is providing an opportunity for Native American, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiian survivors to share their stories, connect communities with trauma-informed support, and facilitate collection of a permanent oral history.
• In 2020–2021, articles of congressional legislation have been introduced to formally document and investigate boarding school policies and practices in the United States.
• The Catholic Church has yet to acknowledge its role in Indian boarding schools and the crimes committed against Indigenous children.
